Crytek is releasing Ryse: Son of Rome on PC

08 August 2014

By Wesley "CataclysmZA" Fick

Ryse: Son of Rome is probably one of the best-looking games on the planet, with Crytek’s muscle behind every pixel and CryEngine 3 showing off just how good games can look on the Xbox One. Its development was a difficult period for Crytek, with Microsoft pushing them for an early release with the Xbox One’s launch, timed to coincide with Sony’s Playstation 4 launch in November 2013. Now it looks like Crytek, fresh out of a financial crisis and eager to get back on its feet, is preparing a port of the game to be published on PC.

The PC version of Ryse: Son of Rome is set for a Holiday 2014 launch and it will be co-published by Deep Silver, the same company that took over Crytek UK in Nottingham and is currently overseeing the completion of Homefront: The Revolution.

Although Deep Silver will be doing the boxed version, Crytek will be publishing the game themselves on the internet. At this point, it seems very likely that it will be going on Steam (har har, Microsoft) and will include DLC such as the Colosseum Pack, the Mars’ Chosen pack, Duel of Fates and the Morituri pack, all of which make the game’s colosseum challenges more fun and online multiplayer, well… challenging.

“4K gaming is another leap in graphics quality for PC gamers and Ryse is the perfect showcase for what’s now possible in high-end PC games,” Crytek business development chief Carl Jones said.

“We’ve given our team the opportunity to show what CryEngine can really achieve, without compromising quality, thanks to the incredible hardware available now to PC gamers. Ryse will be a benchmark PC graphics showcase this year and probably for a long time in future. Our community asked for a Ryse PC version, and we have the means and technology to deliver this title with the highest quality possible.”

This might not be the start of a wave of Xbox One titles to come to the PC, though. At GDC 2013 Microsoft did show off a version of Forza Motorsport 5 running on a PC with a very early version of DirectX 12, but it’s unlikely that it’ll ever really appear on there. A sequel to Ryse: Son of Rome was planned by Microsoft and Crytek, but the latter didn’t want to sign away their rights to the IP.

If you’re wondering just what kind of hardware would be needed to play Ryse at the same level of graphical fidelity as the Xbox One, you’re more than likely looking at a Intel Core i3-4130 or AMD FX-4300 along with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon R7 250X for 1080p. It appears that Crytek wants Ryse to make the same impact to graphical benchmarking as the original Crysis did for the high-end PC market, so don’t expect this to run on almost anything.

Some screenshots of the game follow below. Hey! This is the best reason for buying a Xbox One controller for PC!

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